Word: clowning
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...season started in February," says Martin Lacey, owner of the Great British Circus, "and I've got comedy acrobats stranded in the Ukraine and Mongolian horse riders who were refused their visas in Ulaanbaatar." The holes in his lineup have forced Lacey to draft last-minute substitutes. "Our Mexican clown is stuck in Mexico, so we've got a trapeze artist pretending to be a stooge just to get everybody out of trouble," he says. "It's a mess." (See 10 things to do in London...
...eagerly anticipate squirming; that's the fun of live TV. On Sunday night the big chances for it rested upon Rourke - his acceptance speech the night before at the Independent Spirit Awards was five minutes of wondrously ribald thank-yous and genial insults - and Jerry Lewis, the legendary, infamous clown, now 82, who would receive an honorary award. Would the long-ago star-director of imaginative, raucous comedies prance out and shout "Mel-vin!"? Would he, bearing in mind how he's been scorned by mainstream U.S. critics but revered in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, give his acceptance...
...Lewis in the popular farces Rock-a-Bye Baby and The Geisha Boy. Each man had recorded hit singles, headlined in Vegas, guested on many TV shows. Lewis had also emceed the Oscar event twice before, with wit and dignity and without incident. (See TIME's photos: "Jerry Lewis, Clown Icon...
...late '60s, Lewis's film popularity waned. In his 40s, he had not found a maturer version of the crazy kid audiences had once loved. The low point came in 1972, when he starred in and directed The Day the Clown Cried, a sort of Bozo at Auschwitz drama that was never released and remains a very tantalizing lost film. Comedian Harry Shearer - whose report on the 1976 Telethon is one of the finest pieces written on Lewis, and who may have seen the movie - described it as "the Holocaust on black velvet." In what must be another painful twist...
...still a stigma attached to street performing. “You do your show and at the end people come up to you and come to give you money. Five minutes later and you’re a bum again,” says David J. Holzman, a clown with a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California and a Master’s Degree in Elementary Education from Lesley University. “The new people coming just assume you’re a bum and you have to start all over again...